A couple of days ago, I reblogged a post that identified a bunch of black Victorian bodices as mourning attire, and explained how the bodices in the picture were more than likely NOT mourning attire. When you’re looking at morbid victorian shit and thinking of buying some, you really really really have to know what you’re looking at because a lot of unscrupulous (or sometimes genuinely ignorant) sellers will identify a black garment or piece of hair jewelry as for mourning or a photograph as post-mortem so they can sell it at a higher price than they would get otherwise. Luckily, if you know your shit, you can identify this false advertising and avoid getting duped.
First of all, just because it’s black absolutely DOES NOT mean it was for mourning. Black was actually a very popular color to wear back then just as it is today simply because it’s universally flattering and it hides stains and dirt pretty well, and, damn, it just looks good! Extant mourning garments are extremely rare, and often come as part of an ensemble with all the correct mourning accessories (more on that later). The vast majority of extant black Victorian garments on the market are regular every day wear. So much so that if you come across a black garment that doesn’t have the corresponding accessories or some kind of documentation explicitly defining it as mourning, you should assume it’s just a regular garment.
Mourning was a much more complicated practice than a lot of people realize. Imagine: an immediate family member dies. You have to go out and either dye ALL of your clothes black or just straight out buy a new all-black wardrobe. THEN six months later, you enter a NEW stage of mourning, so you once again have to go get MORE new garments for the second stage. THEN you have to get more stuff for half-mourning. Simply put, it’s a very very expensive and impractical practice, and you need the means to do it properly, so it tended to be more of a practice of the upper classes, and middle classes who aspired to be like them.
Of course, this is all only if you’re a woman. Mourning for men meant wearing a black arm band or hat band and maybe toning down the way you dress a little bit, but it didn’t go farther than that. The ideal Victorian woman stayed at home, tending to her gentle crafts and caring for her family. This expectation of course completely ignores the fact that working-class Victorian women often had no choice but to work, and middle class women who couldn’t hire a bevy of servants had a load of grueling household chores to do on her own on top of taking care of the kids and doing all the cooking. So when I talk about Victorian ideals, I’m talking about ideals that could only be achieved by women of means.
Nationality is also an issue here. Although the practice had been around in various forms long before her, Queen Victoria codified the standards of mourning in the years after the death of Prince Albert on December 14, 1861. The date is very important here, because this is when the United States was elbows-deep in the beginning of the Civil War. European women strove to be like the grand queen, and American women did, too, but it’s very very very hard to do the full practice of mourning at a time when resources are scarce and pretty much everyone has lost one or more close family members. Mourning was actually banned in parts of the South because it put such a strain on resources and morale. Because of this, mourning was never as popular in the US as it was in Europe. Gone With The Wind actually has a pretty good depiction of how it all worked, but I don’t want to get into it because that would take too long.
Mourning was usually divided into three stages: first, or deep mourning, second mourning, and then half-mourning.
Deep mourning was worn in the months immediately after the death of a family member, and its rules were the strictest. Because of this, deep mourning clothes are the easiest to identify. Dresses should be made out of any non-lustrous material. A specific kind of pebbly material called crape was the most popular material, although other matte fabrics like taffeta or moire could also be used. Shiny stuff like stain and velvet was a no-no. Because it was used exclusively in mourning wear, crape is actually the only indisputable way to identify a mourning garment without the accessories or documentation.
Aside from the matter fabric, deep mourning dresses had ONLY black with no white or colored accessories. Decoration, frills, and lace were minimal, nothing sparkly or fluffy. Jewelry was minimal, usually limited to memorial jewelry (which I’ll get into in its own post) or small pieces made of jet, gutta percha, or other black materials.
The biggest indicator of mourning wasn’t just the black dress, it’s the accessories that go with it. The give-away of mourning is the veil, which can go from reaching down the back to reaching all the way to the floor and is often opaque, to hide the widow from the world. Actually a practical thing to wear when you’re ugly crying and don’t want to wear makeup. Veils were a popular accessory for Victorian woman, and a lot of them were black, but mourning veils were unique in that they were long, opaque, and attached to black bonnets with no excess decoration.
If you see a picture of a woman in a plain black dress and she’s not wearing this tell-tale veil, chances are, she’s just wearing a black dress and isn’t in mourning, again UNLESS you have documentation stating “this picture was taken several months after the death of a family member, when the subject was in mourning.” This is another thing shitty antique dealers do, take pictures of women in dark dresses and say “she’s in mourning!” If she’s got gold jewelry, colored flowers in her bonnet, and isn’t wearing that long black veil (or if the veil is short, cute, and lacy), she’s not in mourning.
Not only would her veil be black, everything else would be black, her shoes, her gloves, her parasol, even her handkerchiefs, ALL OF IT would be specially made for mourning, and black. This is where the difference between what’s mourning and what’s not mourning can be really porous. Just like you can wear a nice black dress to a funeral, a job interview, and on a date, black garments could go back and forth and be repurposed. While there were generally-agreed to rules for what mourners wore and how they should behave, there were no hard and fast official rules for how fancy was too fancy, and quite a lot of it came down to personal taste.
After deep mourning came second mourning, where the restrictions were lifted somewhat. Beading, ruffles, lace, and white collars and cuffs were acceptable, and the veil could be lighter and shorter. Shiny fabrics were acceptable. Minimal, not-too-flashy pieces of jewelry could be worn. After the death of Prince Albert, Queen Victoria wore second mourning for the rest of her life, and many older widows followed her example.
Finally, came half-mourning, which is the hardest to identify without documentation. White, grey, and purple were all acceptable, and veils were often forgone. Because of this, confirmable examples of half-mourning are really, really, really rare, because it was the first step into returning to a life outside of mourning, and almost always requires explicit documentation to confirm.
So there you have it. Not all sellers of antique clothes are shitty and trying to push a regular black garment as mourning, but a lot of them are. I hate to sound elitist but fancier, higher-end sellers tend do be more accurate and honest about what they’re selling because when you reach that higher-end market, you’re dealing with people who know what the fuck they’re looking for and are willing to pay a thousand dollars for an antique dress as long as it’s the real deal. For your average schmo selling a hundred dollar bodice on ebay or in a cheap antique mall, it’s very much buyer beware, you get what you pay for. For real, when it comes to antiques, the good shit’s expensive. If you want to buy an inexpensive black Victorian garment because you think it’s cool and you want to start your own antique fashion collection, go for it, just don’t get tricked into thinking it’s mourning.
